by Michael Stein

This article was originally published in Grassroots Fundraising Journal

Oh, email! For many individuals and organizations, email has transformed both the quantity and quality of human communication. Simultaneously intimate and public, email is a daily symbol of the potential and danger that technology promises. To some, email is a simple and sublime medium to communicate in the modern world. To others and often the same people it is a reviled and bottomless pit of unwanted spam that infuriates and frustrates.

Nonprofit organizations of all sizes and budgets are exploring how to integrate email into a comprehensive communications and fundraising strategy. Some are far along the road of doing so; others are just starting out. This article provides an overview of why and how to use email in your fundraising program.

Email is a flexible and easy-to-use medium for both the sender and the receiver. Email is important precisely because it's regular, constant, and often the way most people engage with the internet. It's fast, cheap, easy to use, and informal. There's also that quality of its being "viral" that is, email is content that's easy for your readers to pass on by forwarding. As many organizations can attest, this can exponentially expand your network and reach.

Email brings immediate response, allowing us to gauge how well we're reaching our constituencies. The benefits of that immediacy goes both ways: now your community can have more access to you and provide the gold of any good relationship: a dynamic feedback loop.

Email can also provide content in its own right. The voice, style, presentation and format are all critical to your success. Email is fast, but that doesn't mean that you can jot off emails without foresight and the help of an editor.

Recently, one organization, MoveOn.org, has demonstrated how effective the personal email voice can be. MoveOn has a database of two million email subscribers, but each mailing they send feels as though it's written to just the reader receiving it because each communication is written in a direct, simple, clear and personal voice. One way they achieve this is by keeping each email focused on one central thought.

The same virtues of email also highlight its limitations. While it's fast and easy, it's also rather "disposable," as it's easy to delete. The very quality of immediacy can negate its power and impact. When sending email, we are dealing with the dreaded domain of unwanted email or "spam," a sensitive issue for many email users.

That "send" button warrants perhaps more caution and respect before we use it. From a communications point of view, it's important to be sensitive to when it's appropriate to use email, and when the phone or regular post mail is better. From a communications point of view, it's important to be sensitive to when it's appropriate to use email, and when the phone or regular post mail is better.

INTEGRATE EMAIL INTO YOUR FUNDRAISING MIX

There are several reasons that email should be seen as the foundation, or basic unit, of your online fundraising practices and strategy. The key to understanding email and leveraging it to suit your needs is to recognize how it gracefully complements all aspects of your communications from your website to the forms people fill out when they mail in a donation and the ways you ask for donations. Simply stated, email is now a vital part of all of your outreach and communications.

Email can complement your fundraising efforts by enabling you to create campaigns, conduct seasonal fundraising, and work across mediums by integrating it with your other fundraising strategies, including direct mail, web, phone, face-to-face solicitations, and events.

Email can be effective at augmenting some of your current fundraising practices. For example, you may choose to send an email newsletter at the same time that you're mailing a direct mail appeal , or send a personal email "thanks" after you've made a phone call. More and more, supporters and donors are becoming comfortable with being contacted in multiple mediums. Email is now ubiquitous enough that you can even make the "ask" in email. Asking for financial support via email is most effective when that donor originally donated via your website.

In all these instances, the idea is to use email to cultivate dynamic, strong relations with your donors and prospective donors.

HOW TO USE EMAIL TO EXPAND YOUR DONOR RELATIONSHIPS

There are three major formats to reach your members or prospective members through email: email newsletters, action alerts, and donation appeals.

1) Publish a Regular Email Newsletter to Reach Out and Touch People

The email newsletter is arguably the most effective use of email at this time. It's malleable, dynamic, and easy to produce. The email newsletter is where using email shines. You can keep your community in the loop, present a personal and branded mode of communication, conduct a very efficient and inexpensive method of regular updates, and get as fancy or plain as you want to.

One common email newsletter formatting question for organizations concerns the "plain text or HTML" issue. HTML stands for "Hypertext Markup Language," which is the basic programming language for creating web pages. HTML when in email enables messages to appear with complex formatting of fonts, columns, and embedded images.

There are increasing numbers of inexpensive tools to use to create your own HTML email template, and several internet vendors specialize in HTML email creation and delivery. Recent studies demonstrate that recipients receiving messages in HTML are more likely to pass the message on and to "click-through" to the organization's website.

However, not everyone has the kind of sophisticated email application required to view HTML. Fortunately, most vendors who send email newsletters use what's called an "HTML sniffer," a feature that automatically substitutes a plain-text email message if the recipient's email program cannot handle HTML. Keep in mind, too, that the more graphically fancy your newsletter is, the longer it takes to download regardless of the email application.

[ONE/Northwest provides several email newsletter solutions to Northwest environmental groups.]

2) Use the "Action Alert" Model to Mobilize Supporters

The action alert is perhaps the first real application of email by nonprofits, beginning with simple text emails circulating among lists of affinity groups and communities. The action alert has evolved, thanks to the advancements in vendor technology, to provide more leverage and options for how you choose to mobilize your constituencies.

For example, you can now efficiently target action alerts to specific individuals by narrowing your list by any of your database fields, such as zip code, state, or issue interest. Technology also allows you to create follow-up emails based on previous responses to earlier action alerts. So, for example, you might filter your list by all the people who sent faxes from your website last month.

3) Don't Fear Using Email to Make a Direct Appeal for Donations

Most donors give simply because they're asked. It's that simple. Email can be effectively used for donation appeals. Email tends to work best when it's used as part of a coordinated effort across multiple mediums. For example, you may be raising money to send a delegation to the state capital by conducting a variety of fundraising activities, such as house parties, a print mailing, and a phone campaign. Adding an email component to this campaign and encouraging people to forward the email to five friends will help spread the word and tie in well to the other activities.

Other occasions that work well for email appeals are seasonal occasions, such as an annual fund drive, an awards dinner, or a holiday. Again, online fundraising works best when it's coordinated with a real-world activity.

MoveOn.org is a vivid case study in how personal, direct, and simple email solicitations can work. MoveOn follows a few basic guidelines that ensure their success: they solicit on rare occasions that tie in with real-world urgencies (such as the invasion of Iraq); they make the pitch transparently clear and tied to a specific campaign; and they communicate with clear language and from a distinct person.

HOW TO GET MORE FROM EMAIL

There are several other uses to which you can put email.

Use Email to Drive Traffic to Your Website

Email notices are particularly effective at getting your email reader to visit your website. If your organization's website is rich in resources and content, with frequent changes or additions of information, you can use email notices to inform people when you have made updates to your website.

Specific update emails can be a simple and quick way to drive traffic to your website, while providing a service to your community. This is also a good way to use your email newsletter, as it can provide hyperlinks to new content on the website.

While your website is extremely important, it's vital to view your email and website as integrated and working together. View email as the outreach aspect of your website and your organization's content; it's what goes out, and on the website is where the substantial content resides. Emails are tasters, reminders ideally used for short messages, time-specific items, and action prompts.

The email should drive traffic to your site with links. Using technology to track your email "click-throughs" allows you to measure how well your email efforts are working . When you send an email out, how is the traffic to your site affected? If you don't see a rise in traffic, how can you modify your email messaging to enhance traffic?

Segment Content to Communicate Better

Many organizations decide to tailor their email messaging to their various constituencies and communities. If your organization has lots of rich content to share, it's extremely effective to package this content to specialized lists.

For example, the nonprofit think tank Redefining Progress begins with a simple link on their homepage that the reader can click to receive electronic updates about the group's work. The visitor is taken to a sign-up page where they can select from a menu of newsletters based on issue areas. This enables Redefining Progress to segment their list based on issue area, while learning more about their community and catering to the distinct needs of their diverse constituencies.

What does this have to do with fundraising? Everything. Stronger traction with your members and community through more personalized communication translates into higher yields when it comes time for fundraising. It also increases the value to the reader of participating in the organization.

Evaluate Your Email Effectiveness

It's essential to evaluate your email practices continually to gauge their effectiveness and whether you are meeting your desired outcomes. Assembling a profile of your email practices can inform decisions about features like formatting, content, and timing.

Measure the number of new email newsletter subscribers and the number of unsubscribers every month, charting them in a spreadsheet. When you notice spikes in either subscriptions or unsubscriptions, look at what was happening with your e-messages during that time to identify how your approach is working and what may need to be modified.

Many email vendors used for sending electronic newsletters have built-in features for tracking whether the email is received, opened, and whether the recipient clicked through to your website or took some other action, such as forwarding the email to others. You will find this information to be enormously valuable and it's exciting to have such a "live" reading of how people are responding to your communications. Email is one of the few mediums that can allow you to do that.

Use Email Respectfully

Issues of privacy are increasingly important for people on both sides of the email screen the sender and the receiver. Therefore, when you ask for people's email address, let them know exactly what you intend to do with that information.

The most important things to make clear in a first email are whether or not you will share their email address with other partners, how people can unsubscribe ("optout"), and how people can contact you with complaints.

The last thing you want is for people to feel you are abusing their email address. This fear can be easily avoided by making your practices and intentions transparent from the get-go. A good method is to create a privacy statement on your website that people can review when they sign up or give you their email address.

Avoid Spam Filters with Effective Practices

After all your work, you need to know how to avoid having your lovingly crafted email newsletters and other email communiques relegated to the "trash" bin by a spam filter. Spam filters are programs email users can set up that automatically delete email messages according to criteria the user establishes.

A large factor in avoiding having your message deleted has to do with the From, To, and Subject lines in your email communications. The "From" line should clearly identify your organization so that there is no doubt in the recipient's mind about who the email is from. The "To" line should show the name of one recipient, rather than a "suppressed list." The "Subject" line should identify the email newsletter and maybe the issue date.

For example, each email from MoveOn.org comes from one of their staff, and this name appears in the From: line in the email, thereby reducing the likelihood of interpreting their emails as spam.

Collect Email Addresses Everywhere You Can

Does your website offer a box where the visitor can enter their email address to receive further information by email or subscribe to an email newsletter? When people join your organization, whether by postal mail or online, is there an email field to enter?

Collect email everywhere, both online and off. An email address is a basic piece of data about your donor, member, supporter, or affiliate. Therefore, you want to do everything in your power to make sure you have this data.

Do an inventory on how you collect data and information about your prospective supporter. There should be a sign-up option on all your website pages and on all your giving forms, phone calls, mailings, at all events in other words, at every opportunity.

While you're collecting email addresses, be sure to have people also give their full name, postal address, zip code, and possibly interests. It's also useful to know how they found their way to your organization.

[For more ideas on gathering email addresses, see http://www.onenw.org/bin/page.cfm/pageid/31.]

EMAIL IS ABOUT CULTIVATING RELATIONSHIPS

Using email for fundraising is much more than literally soliciting for support. It's about cultivating relationships, keeping the feedback loops intact, and thereby ensuring a stronger base of support. Email is a versatile tool that can be leveraged to greatly enhance and complement all aspects of donor and member relations.

Once this broader picture is firmly in place, it may become more evident how each aspect of how your organization uses email can be linked to your overall fundraising efforts. The range is wonderfully broad: from collecting email addresses on your website to a carefully executed online fundraising campaign that uses email as its central vehicle. As a core component of a broad stakeholder communications strategy, email can be the glue to hold your donor relations together and create traction in your communications to yield wonderful results.

Finally, email is not intended to be a substitute for "live" relationships meeting with your donors and other supporters, whether one-on-one or in group settings. What email does is add another method to be in touch with people. So be careful not to start depending on email as an all-purpose fundraising communication vehicle. The harder work of real relationship building still needs to be done.

Michael Stein is a technology writer and internet strategist with two decades of experience working with nonprofits, foundations, labor unions and technology companies. Michael is the author of three books about the internet including "The eNonprofit: A Guide to ASPs, internet Services and Online Software. Find him online at http://www.michaelstein.net/

This article is copyright 2004 Michael Stein.